By Deb Linne
She looked so small in the bed, curled up in ten-out-of-ten pain, with a nasogastric tube down her nose and throat into her stomach, multiple IV lines with electrolytes, and other medications running around the clock keeping her alive. Her pancreas was failing, so inflamed that it could not release the enzymes that help with digestion. Pancreatitis is a brutal, painful condition brought on by heavy alcohol use. It broke my heart with sadness and compassion, because I wasn’t all that far away from being that woman.
I am an acute care RN, and I recently celebrated five years of sobriety. I’m particularly interested in the change of messaging from the health agencies around alcohol use, both from a professional and personal standpoint. I’ve seen what alcohol does, both in my own life and in the lives of my patients. I have seen the absolute health wreckage that stems from drinking: not just pancreatitis but liver failure in 20-somethings who were so yellow and jaundiced they were unrecognizable, diaper rash in a 35-year-old man who had passed out and laid for hours in his own feces… I could tell you stories for days. I have a patient detoxing or suffering ill health from alcohol at least once a week.
I was never as bad as my patients who are literally dying from drinking. I can’t speak for them, but I can speak for how alcohol affects the everyday drinker. Here is my story.
What if they think I was a drunk? What if they imagine I was day-drinking or passing out at home or stumbling around inebriated every day? What if every positive thing I’ve ever done in my life will have an asterisk next to it now: *but she couldn’t control the alcohol.
These are all the things that went through my mind when I was trying to decide whether or not to share with family and friends that I had given up drinking for the year 2020, and quite possibly, for life. I was a mom, I worked with at-risk youth. I wanted the people in my life to like and respect me more than anything. What they thought of me mattered so much that I had not lived my most honest life.
It would have been really easy to call a “health journey” or a “detox” or a “challenge,” because quitting drinking was all of those things. But as I cruised into my late 40s, I developed an intolerance for bullshit, most especially my own.
I’d become truer to myself with age, but I realized there was an area where I was not being real. I was using alcohol in a way that filtered the truest version of me. A couple of glasses of wine softened the edges of a hard day. It eased the chronic anxiety I felt, just enough that I didn’t have to deal with it. It relaxed me so that I forgot when others hurt me — I could just let those things go and not speak up.
It served as my buffer from the world and allowed me to keep people and issues at arm’s length.
